


Wait to Feel the Old Year Go

by theswearingkind



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 06:28:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2841338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theswearingkind/pseuds/theswearingkind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she is eighteen years old, Snow White dies, and that is not the beginning of her story, but neither is it the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wait to Feel the Old Year Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bloodbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/gifts).



> bloodbright, this is not quite the story you asked for, but i hope you find something in it that you like, all the same.
> 
> thank you to my wonderful rl bestie who audienced this for me. i chose not to use archive warnings for this story; see the endnote for any possible triggering materials.
> 
> title from Robert W. Service's [The Passing of the Year](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/passing-year), a poem i found at the absolute last minute when i thought i'd never find a title that fit at all.

When she is born, Snow White is red in her cheeks and pale in her limbs. Her head is small and pointed, covered in fuzz the color of a blackbird’s wing, and her eyes are a strange and lovely shade that is too green for blue and too blue for green. She is a quiet baby; she rarely cries. _Keeps her own counsel, that one does_ , says her nursemaid, and her mother smiles, close-lipped and warm: a wise quality for a future queen.

When she is one year old, when she is two, when she is three, Snow White begins to crawl, to walk, and, eventually, to run. She is quick and sure-footed, solid in her steps, and interested in everything: the evening dew that clings to the spider web in her favorite corner of the courtyard; the tiny sprigs of crocus that push up defiantly through the rich black earth; her mother’s smooth face and her father’s scratchy one; the large-eyed, small-bodied creatures that float above her bed and make the wind keep quiet when she cannot go to sleep. She likes talking to them, and sometimes they will talk back; they don’t know quite the same words she knows, which is very odd, but they understand each other all the same.

When she is four years old, Snow White meets William. He is the only other child Snow White has ever had to play with; the court is very exciting, but it is a place of grown-ups, and for all that she has been quite beloved, she has also been quite alone. William is two years older than she is and comes to court with his father. He does not have a mother, he tells her, and she feels a strange twinge in the place her own mother calls her heart. _You can share my mother, if you like_ , she offers, and he looks at her with all the wisdom of two extra years. _That’s silly,_ he says, _I am not your brother_ , but she rather wishes that he were. 

When she is five years old, when she is six, Snow White spends each summer on tour with her father, who rides out one year east and the next year west to survey his lands and all his people. She has always known the sight of the sea, sometimes calm and gently rolling, other times frenzied and furious, but she learns, those summers, of what it means to lose sight of the edge of the world across an endless flat expanse of farmland, and of the sight of mountains that rise so high she cannot see their peaks above the clouds. All this, she knows, will one day be in her care, as it is now in her father’s. It is a big thought, but she likes how it fills her insides; it is a thought she can grow with.

When she is seven years old, Snow White finds a bird in a field. Its wing is hurt, folded in on itself like the bits of paper her favorite nurse will sometimes write her short poems on, and though it caws and hops away from William, it holds still enough to allow her near. She picks it up carefully, her hands a cradle made for small things, and feels its tiny heart flutter against her fingertips. She will save its life, she decides; at seven years old, full of the small and casual cruelties of youth, this is no mean decision.

When she is eight years old, Snow White loses a mother to the bitterest cold. She loses a father and a best friend and the only life she has ever known, and all she gains in return is a cell, small and dank and full of shadows. And her stepmother, who she had thought to love, whose golden warmth had promised to ward off the chill her mother’s absence left behind—Snow White must watch her stepmother spare her life with neither love nor pity, but only careful calculation: her blood may be of value, one day. Perhaps her mother was right, and her heart is good, for even then she does not hate her stepmother. At eight years old, she is still grateful to be spared. 

When she is nine years old, when she is ten, eleven, twelve, Snow White dreams of the armies who will come and retake the castle in her father’s name; of the softness of the bed in her chamber, many halls and corridors away; of the fields of wheat she used to run through, barefoot and laughing; of the crisp, sweet red of the apples she will tease William with when she sees him again—dozens of them, hundreds, as many as she can find. She turns her mind to indulgences, small or large, and believes she may one day know them again. She is the King’s daughter, after all.

When she is thirteen years old, Snow White has ceased to dream of rescue. She dreams only of privacy—of a place to go where she cannot be seen through the bars of her cage, where the pale, heavy eyes of the Queen’s brother cannot follow her. She cleans herself in the dead of night, when the dark is its most impenetrable, with only a damp cloth and the remnant of each morning’s drinking water, and begins to pretend that she sleeps each time he stops outside her cell door, her body curled in a tight comma on the hard slats of her cot. She does not know what he wants from her, only that she cannot, will not, give it to him.

When she is fourteen years old, Snow White stirs in the night, and in her first few moments of hazy wakening, she sees, or imagines she sees, a black-winged crow perched on the barred window of her cell. It stares at her with cold, glittering, intelligent eyes, but when she blinks and looks again, it is gone. She wonders if this crow—or is it a raven? she never has been able to tell the difference—was cousin to the one she meant to rescue, so many years ago, or if it existed at all; she sometimes thinks she sees things that are not truly there. 

When she is fifteen years old, when she is sixteen, Snow White waits for the bird, leaving crumbs from her meager portion of stale and tasteless bread on the slim window-sill, but it never returns. Rains come, heavy and stinging even through the thick stone walls, and wash the crumbs away. The rains do not stop for so long that she begins to lose track of time—the only thing she had been able to remain sure of in her prison cell, counting the days by their dawnings, the months by finger-smudges in the fireplace, the years by how little she can recall of her mother’s, her father’s face. But then the damp settles in her bones, and she begins to know each new morning by its ache.

When she is seventeen years old, Snow White at last begins to dream of revenge, and wonders if this means her goodness, at last, has left her; if it, too, is a prisoner of this tower. At least the revenge she longs for is not one of blood and pain, of bones littered across battlefields, but of justice: of her father’s banner flying high again, springtime returning to cover the land, the world once more the riot of color she remembers from her childhood. In her dreams, she does not age. In her dreams, she is eight years old, still, and she takes the throne wearing the same gown of silver-blue she wore the night her stepmother plunged a dagger into her father’s heart. When they hand her the scepter of gold and ruby that her father used to hold, her slippered feet do not touch the floor. She wakes each morning to the same cramped gray cell, but in her veins, her long-sluggish blood begins to warm, to flow again. A bird returns to her window, and in its beak it carries a small, budding branch. Something is changing, and she prays it may be her.

When she is eighteen years old, Snow White sees her chance and takes it. She runs from the room she has not left since she entered it. She fights the pain of the too-bright light that carves at her eyes as the Queen wants to carve at her heart, as the Queen’s brother wants to carve at her thighs. She follows the birds, who have come back for her, who show her the way. She escapes.

When she is eighteen years old, Snow White is hunted into the Dark Forest by a man who thinks his sorrows outweigh those of the rest of the world. She does not trust the huntsman, but even she knows that she cannot reach the Duke’s castle alone. She shakes his hand and places her life in it. 

When she is eighteen years old, Snow White feels the flames lick her skin as a village burns because she sleeps in it. She hears the pained bellow of the white stag as an arrow pierces its side because she stands before it. She cries tears onto the face of a good man as his life drains away because she was in danger, and he saved her from it. Kneeling beside the last, she takes a sword in her hand and thinks, for the first time, that she can use it, that she shall.

When she is eighteen years old, Snow White dies, and that is not the beginning of her story, but neither is it the end. She wakes from death a weapon, sure of spirit and of purpose, her body a blade, her heart a battle-drum sounding the call. Its pounding reminds her that it is still her own.

When she is eighteen years old, Snow White has her revenge, and it is not sweet, but it satisfies: still a wound, but one sealed by fire. There will be ache yet, she knows; she will bear a scar. But the scar is hers. Her heart is hers. The kingdom is hers. 

When she is eighteen years old, Snow White returns, and takes the throne, and makes the world new. 

She rules with the promise of spring.

**Author's Note:**

> minor allusions to possible sexual abuse.


End file.
